Behind every great villain is… frankly, well, often there’s another bigger villain pulling the strings. But the truth is, while we often celebrate “the big bad” some of the most interesting villainy comes from the lieutenants that the hero meets along the way to facing the big bad. Sometimes, these henchmen might even eclipse the…
Tag: tv
e429. Out of this World: Alien Archetypes in Pop Culture
Aliens are one of the most enduring concepts in popular culture. It makes sense really. If we know there are other planets then it stands to reason that we might wonder what’s on them. There’s no shortage of books, films, TV shows and video games that explore this. So it’s kind of weird that we…
e428. The Supergirl Legacy: The Evolution of the Maid of Might
If you pay attention to the weekly pop-culture media landscape you might be aware that a new Supergirl movie released the weekend before this episode. It performed… somewhat underwhelmingly at the box office. It also had mixed reviews. But is that fair? On this episode Mav, Wayne and Hannah welcome returning guest, comics scholar Anna…
e426. Narrative & Technology (& Narrative) Syllabus Special
A few weeks ago, Mav was talking with friend of the show Joe Darowski about a new class Joe is teaching at Bringham Young University called “Technology & Narrative”. Joe asked if Mav had any suggestions for the course since it seemed up his alley. Well, as it turns out, Mav regularly teaches a course…
e416. All the Cinderellas: an Exploration of Trope and Transformation
Often when we think about pop culture we think about relatively recent things. But sometimes it’s good to think about the enduring sources. Fairytales have been popular culture for longer than anyone in history knows. So much so that we don’t even know who wrote a lot of them. On today’s episode, Monica, Mav, and…
e414. Strings Attached: Puppetry, from Marionettes to AI
Puppetry is one of the oldest and most respected performance art styles in the world. Except, in America we have reduced it almost entirely to the domain of children’s entertainment. Or have we? Maybe puppets are all around us in every kind of media. Maybe we’re actually using puppets every day and we don’t even…
e409. Tommy Westphall’s Snowglobe: Exploring Fiction’s Largest Shared Universe
Most TV, movies, books… fiction in general don’t exist. This is obvious. That’s sort of the point of fiction. but what if it didn’t exist beyond the obvious fact that we imagined it. What if all we didn’t even imagine it… or maybe most of us didn’t. What if the vast majority of fiction ever…
e406. So, We Live in the Pitt and Here is What We Think of It…
Well, unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard of HBOMax’s new hit series the Pitt. After all, it recentlywon like a billion Golden Globes and Emmys. Well… ok, two Globes and five Emmys but still. It’s doing super well, and it’s critically acclaimed. We mentioned it briefly on our “Things You Missed” episode,…
e404. Stranger Endings: Breaking Down the End of Stranger Things
For some reason Netflix, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the proper way for everyone in the world to spend their winter Holidays of American Thanksgiving through Christmas and New Years was to focus on concluding the — wow… ten year — Stranger Things saga. And somehow, even with all of our various holiday things…